sometimes it is the fall
by maybe okay
Summary: It's not the fall that kills you, people say, it's the landing. Unless you happen to fall in love. "They don't tell you that you never stop falling—a bottomless pit as just as bad as a concrete floor." Swan Queen.


**Note**: What the hell? I don't know what this is. This didn't even particularly begin as a Swan Queen thing, but somehow turned into one. This is what happens when you just start writing, and apparently your go-to is angst—I don't know how to feel about that, since I'm not a particularly angst-filled person. Anyway, this is a kind of flow of consciousness thing, and there wasn't any grand plot to fulfill.

I wanted to put in here that I'd love to take prompts; I've gotten back into quick little ficlets, and I'd love to know what people were interested in seeing. I have a tumblr (link in my profile), and wouldn't mind getting them there. Anyway! Enjoy?

**Summary**: It's not the fall that kills you, people say. Unless you happen to fall in love. "They don't tell you that you never stop falling—a bottomless pit is just as bad as a concrete floor."

It comes as a moment long after denial, but just before acceptance. After children's bedtimes, but before the moon stars dipping back toward the horizon. You're sitting more rigidly than ever, a stranger in your own home, a glass of forgotten wine set out on the table like a soldier ready to die for a cause. This cause is the final nail in the coffin that it us—the eulogy to the funeral that will be our lives after this moment.

After all one of us is finally truthful enough to say it.

"I'm tired of loving you." You look tired; it isn't as dramatic as shadows under your eyes, or sluggish resentment in your limbs. It's the way you stare through me, the way you toss your house slippers under the table, the slow blinks that say you hope for something other than what's in front of you when you open your eyes.

"Everyone says it's as easy to fall out of love as it is to fall into it," you obviously aren't looking for confirmation, on whether or not I'm tired too. You tease a fingertip around the rim of your glass, the crystal singing like nails down a chalkboard. "They don't tell you that you never stop falling—a bottomless pit is just as bad as a concrete floor. My bones may not be broken, and my heart might be without a bruise—but there's nothing there."

I sit gingerly on the edge of the table, our knees almost bumping, though we've settled to stare over each other's shoulders; I can't help but trace my eyes over the familiar lines of your shadow. The uneven tilt of your shoulders that would give you away to me nine-hundred ninety nine times out of a thousand. The long length of your neck, which you've always had a certain uncertainty about.

"I still love you, and sometimes I think it would be easier if I didn't." No one has ever felt so much for me; positive, or negative, it doesn't matter. I've always been so easily forgotten in the grand scheme of things—a secondary character in the story of my own life. A two-bit player in a stage I've bought with sweat and tears, and painted with blood and bile. But when given the chance, you gave me the spotlight—sometimes it wasn't intentional, but my role was destined to stand opposite you. Your spotlight became mine.

"It's the stupidest thing a person can do, right?" Like somehow if I agree, it will be alright. "Fall in love." You say it with the heavy tongue of someone exhausted by the truth, because lies are so much lighter—they're weightless and buoyant. They don't sink to the bottom of your stomach like a stone, and choke the words before they tumble from a leaden tongue. I wish I felt anything now, but I'll be nothing without the lie. I've tethered everything I am to them, I can't speak for hopes that you'll turn around before you go through with this. It's another lie; pretending that I don't see the resolve in your face.

"They said it'd get easier, as if something like this gets easier." And that glass of wine is downed like the soldier it is; cast out into no man's land empty and ignored. Another nameless victim in the eternal war fought for love. Billions of roses slaughtered, gallons of wine spilled, endless graves of chocolate—a massacre ending in an untold number of broken hearts.

"You said you'd never leave me; and I'm a horrible person for wishing that you had." The words are stumbling like a toddler, tottering unsteadily over shivering lips and clicking teeth. "If you had left, everyone would understand anger, and spite, and hatred." Like those are better, less toxic, things to feel; but it isn't about the burn of poison in your blood, or the scars of struggle in your bones. It's about not being able to justify feeling. "But you stayed; and now I'm just tired."

"I love you, and I'll always love you, and no one tells you that's the problem with love." You're standing now, walking around the room blowing out candles like they're final statements. A sharp exhale, and darkness slides in like a forgotten bedfellow. Sneaking across the floor, chasing your heels. But you're being truthful now, and you remember that the dark never scared you to begin with—I'd just needed to feel like you needed me, that when the light faded away my arms were where you'd find solace. You love me, you always will—but you're done pretending that you need me.

"It doesn't go away; even when the person's gone. It lingers," I don't get up to follow you, I remain in the dark. The lies have all dissolved now, and I can't exist in this world of acceptance you've stepped into. A place where love is a lingering tired thing, where the truth isn't a weapon—but a useless balm that takes the pain away for moments at a time.

They say a person dies twice. First their body; the twisted wreckage of a yellow car tumbling down an icy embankment, a child's inhaler clattering across the roof when the beetle lands upside down on a barely frozen lake. When ice water pours into unconscious lungs, and it takes only one breath to submerge a person who'd been drowning their entire lives. The kind of everyday thing that fairytale kisses can't fix.

That's the first time. The second time comes decades, and a thousand miles, later—you've moved away with your acceptance. A warm city baking in the sun, where you're a nameless face in a city full of them—I say they're your great-grandchildren, but I suppose they're mine as well. Magic has been forgotten in favor of the quiet ordinary—bake sales and prom nights; broken hearts and pints of ice cream. We're not a legend anymore, and I think you like that; you're mom, and grandma, and grams—and when you're lowered into the ground. I can remember how love felt at the beginning.

Powerful, and absolute, and inevitable. You're beautiful; old, young, and vibrant. Life spilling through skin, heat pulsing in time with a heartbeat I've forgotten the sound of. We're here, and nowhere, and everywhere—but that's alright because we're together. We coast through years like pages in a favorite book, skipping chapters and going back to our favorites—you ask me things you've forgotten, and you remind me of the things I don't even remember forgetting. The exact shade of amber your eyes get in the sun, the precise number of crinkles at the corner of your eye when you smile genuinely—things I promised to never forget, once upon a time.

But you forgive me—because you love me.

We die together this time; and it must be some lingering thread of fate that ties us together, even in this land without magic. The second time comes when great-grandchildren lose ancient photo albums in an unseasonable flood during the driest summer in Albuquerque history; a basement pipe bursts and boxes of easily forgotten family heirlooms are thrown out to protect the foundation from mold and mildew. We die because this is the last time anyone will ever say our names.

"Who're they?" A little girl with eyes a few shades lighter than yours, and a little boy with a chin more Henry's than mine ask aimlessly, with hefted shoulders and frequent exhales; a candid photo from our slingshot wedding turned over to make out my scrawling handwriting—century old ink weeping from warm water. "Regina Mills and Emma Swan, 2014."

The curtain has to fall eventually; even on the characters long out of the spotlight.


End file.
